Matt Flinner

Musician
Best known for Mandolin

Matt Flinner is a mandolinist, banjo player and composer who won the national banjo contest at Winfield, Kansas, in 1990 and the mandolin contest there the following year. He has recorded for Compass Records as a soloist, with the trio Phillips, Grier and Flinner and with his own Matt Flinner Trio, and he played in the Modern Mandolin Quartet, whose album Americana received three Grammy nominations in 2013.

Assisted by AI. Spot something off? Help us fix it.

He started out on the banjo, playing bluegrass festivals before he was a teenager. His first musical experiences were in Salt Lake City, where his older brother Rex taught him banjo at ten and then mandolin, and where his father hosted a bluegrass show on KRCL-FM; at twelve he joined a youth band, the Peewee Pickers. He earned a bachelor of music degree in composition at the University of Utah. After his Winfield wins he played in the early 1990s in Sugarbeat, the band of the banjo player Tony Furtado, whose one album came out on Planet Bluegrass in 1994, and he played guitar on Tim and Mollie O’Brien’s Away Out on the Mountain (Sugar Hill, 1994).

His first solo album, The View from Here (Compass, 1998), was produced by the bassist Todd Phillips and featured David Grier on guitar, Mike Marshall on bouzouki, Jerry Douglas on Dobro and the fiddlers Darol Anger, Stuart Duncan and Tim O’Brien. Latitude (Compass, 2000) brought back Grier, Duncan, Douglas and Phillips. With Phillips and Grier he also recorded Phillips, Grier and Flinner (1999) and Looking Back (2002) for Compass, and he played mandolin on Alison Brown’s Fair Weather (Compass, 2000). Walking on the Moon (Compass, 2003) came from his electric Matt Flinner Quartet.

He moved to Nashville in 1999, and in 2002 he joined the Modern Mandolin Quartet, a chamber group of two mandolins, mandola and mandocello that plays classical and contemporary pieces. After the death of Leftover Salmon’s founding banjo player Mark Vann in 2002, he filled in on banjo with that band until it regrouped. In 2006 he formed the Matt Flinner Trio with the guitarist Ross Martin and the bassist Eric Thorin; on its “Music du Jour” tours each member writes new pieces on the road and the band plays them the same night. The Trio’s Compass albums are Music du Jour (2009), Winter Harvest (2012) and Traveling Roots (2016).

He has also toured and recorded with Tim O’Brien, Frank Vignola, Steve Martin, Darrell Scott, Alison Brown, Tony Trischka, Darol Anger, Dave Douglas, the Ying Quartet and the Nashville Chamber Orchestra. His longer compositions have been performed by the Ying Quartet, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, Chatterbird, the Expedition Quintet and the Modern Mandolin Quartet.

Share Playlist